Meanwhile, our hero, Resident Olive along with two tablespoons of his coarsely chopped olive friends have made there way to Isle of Food Processor where they joined rebel garbanzo beans in an attempt to combine forces to save Princess Hummus from their evil emperor. Once combined, they traveled to Princess Hummus’s prison bowl. Upon arrival, Resident Olive realized they would need more allies and called on two more tablespoons of coarsely chopped pitted kalamata olives. When the allies arrived, the evil emperor fired bolts of fresh parsley on them in attempt to overtake the rescue.

Princess Hummus counterattacked this spell by casting a delicious hummus summon spell which caused a human to save everyone and return the people of Hummus to their rightful home, The Kingdom of Rachel’s Stomach.

Like the last two times, straight tahini sauce seems to evade me. I swore I saw some somewhere though. I thought it was Trader Joe’s. I thought maybe they made it a seasonal thing or maybe they read my blog and felt bad. I don’t know, but I swear I saw it somewhere.

I’m probably just hallucinating. That happens to crazy people.

As I said, follow the recipe link above and add 1/4 cup of jarred roasted red peppers. These peppers will be chopped up in the food processor, along with everything else.

So far, this is my favorite hummus I’ve made. The red peppers give the hummus a nice small kick that is barley noticeable for me, but I have a high threshold for spice. I enjoy the pain. I would not be impressed with Mr. Grey’s playroom. I’d be like, “What no ghost pepper?!”

This is part II to Light & Healthy’s hummus recipe. You can refer to Hummus Part I by clicking the link.

There aren’t any major differences compared to the first recipe. Like the first time around, I was unable to find tahini and had to use tahini sauce from Trader Joe’s. The sauce has lemon in it as well, so all I ended up doing for the lemon hummus was add the juice of a whole lemon. Then I added a 1/4 of a cup of parsley and mixed it with the hummus.

There’s not much else to say about the recipe. It is definitely full of lemon and you can garnish with lemon zest to make it even more lemonful. I chose not to and that was fine with me.

My next recipe come from Light & Healthy. As I’ve said before, this cookbook is sweet because they experiment with different ingredients until they find healthy and tasty alternatives. I’m a big believer in, if you don’t like how light alternatives taste then don’t torture yourself with it.

I was unaware that hummus needed any tweaking in the healthy department though. To be fair to myself, there isn’t a whole lot of tweaking in this recipe. They basically use less olive oil and tahini. I guess that’s where all the fat is.

What you’ll need for this recipe are 1 15 ounce can of chickpeas, 5 tablespoons of water, 1/4 cup of tahini, 3 tablespoons of lemon juice, 1 1/2 tablespoons of olive oil, 1 small minced garlic clove, salt, 1/4 teaspoon of ground cumin, a pinch of cayenne, and 1 tablespoon of parsley.

The first step is to put the chickpeas, water, tahini, lemon juice, oil, garlic, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, cumin and cayenne in a blender or food processor.

I should note that I could not find straight up tahini, so I ended up using Trader Joe’s tahini sauce. If you do the same just check out the ingredients in the sauce and adjust accordingly. For example, if it has olive oil in it, don’t add in the full amount of olive oil in the recipe.

Either way, you are going to blend this mixture until smooth. After it’s been smoothed you let it settle by transferring it to a bowl and refrigerating for about an hour.

After that’s done you just sprinkle it with some parsley and it’s ready to serve. I also sprinkled mine with more cayenne, but that’s because I’m a spice freak.

The final result is a fairly basic hummus dip. I don’t have much to say about it. It wasn’t amazing, but it did the job. I paired it with pita chip wheat thins, but feel free to do whatever you wish with it.

This Chex mix comes from Light and Healthy which is a cookbook I love, but I am getting tired of making Chex mixes. Thankfully this is the last one. The next recipe will be hummus, which I am excited about.

With all these Chex mixes, the first step is to pre-heat your oven to 250 degrees and the next is to combine all of your crackers, Chex, and etc. into a large bowl. For this recipe you mix the listed ingredients until you get to the butter. From the butter on, are ingredients for the sauce you will pour on your mix later.

For my mix, I really mixed it by using both Corn and Rice Chex, which turned out well. I should also note that like I wrote in my last mix entry, I had trouble finding Melba toast, so I substituted with Brioche toast from Trader Joes again. Other than that, this portion of the recipe went as listed and planned.

Making the sauce for these mixes is always my favorite part. I get a real kick out of watching butter melt. I’m not entirely sure why. It just amuses me.

So as you can guess you are going to melt your butter with the oil, lemon juice, hot sauce, and seasoning over medium-low heat. There isn’t a whole lot of cooking time with this, you just cook until the butter has completely melted and then you drizzle and mix with your mix.

I did have one problem with the sauce portion though. I could not find Old Bay seasoning. Thankfully there are solutions for this. You can either make your own or substitute with Emril’s Essence. There are some great recipes out there for Old Bay Seasoning and it doesn’t look difficult, but I’m not exactly rolling in the dough and that mix requires a lot of spice shopping. So I decided to go for Emril’s Essence, which turned out to be a more than suitable replacement.

Other than that, the rest of the recipe is the same deal as with the other mixes which is baking in the oven for 45 minutes with shuffle breaks every 15 minutes.

This turned out well, but I thought the Barbecue Chex Mix was better. Like always, I brought this to my acting class. I do have a plot twist about that though! I got moved to the advanced level at my school so I had new people to inflict my mixes upon. They seemed to enjoy it like my class before did. I look forward to continually bribing them with food in the future.

I’m back on the Light & Healthy cookbook for another chex mix. This one is barbecue themed. I have a confession to make. I’m not really into chex mixes. Thankfully, I only have one more to go in this book. I keep bringing them to my acting class as well, where they are enjoyed and get eaten up. So at least I don’t have to eat chex mix by myself like the sad person I am.

I just realized a coincidence that I feel like sharing. I’ve mentioned an ex boyfriend on here in a couple of entries. You might remember him from my artichoke recipe. In fact, I think I will call him Artichoke from now on. Anyway as much of a jerk Artichoke was to me, one of the good things we had with each other was being able to joke around.

For example, one night we watched Beetlejuice together and when the scene with Lydia that I have a gif of above came on he looked at me and said, “That’s you.”

I responded with another quote that took place earlier in the movie, which is, “My whole life is a dark room.”

His pet name for girlfriends is pook and my special pook power was being troublesome. I was his troublesome pook, which I admittedly found endearing and annoying at the same time. I learned to embrace it and when he’d called me his troublesome pook I would respond with one of those two quotes. It was our way of affection and my way of making fun of myself.

I do relate to Lydia’s character which I feel like people might find surprising, because I’ve never dressed like a goth or emo kid. I’m always being complimented on my nice smile and apparently I project a pleasant demeanor, but there is an inner goth/emo girl who lives inside of me. I also can be extremely goofy though. In fact I may have a split personality, I’m not sure.

Anyway, the big coincidence reveal is that today is actually that ex’s birthday. I’ll spare you all the other thoughts that have sprung up realizing this though, because I’m aware I’m really bad about editing my content and staying on track as it is.

Just know there are a lot of thoughts that spring into other thoughts that go down rabbit holes that lead to wonderlands of nightmarish qualities.

So let’s get back on track with the recipe, because today is day of barbecue snack mixes and not mad hatter tea parties.

The first step is to preheat the oven to 250. In a bowl you combine corn chex, tortilla chips, Melba toast, pretzel sticks,and smoked almonds. I couldn’t find Melba toast at Von’s and Trader Joe’s got rid of theirs, so I substituted with some dried toast cracker things that a Trader Joe’s employee directed me to. They were close enough, so you can substitute with that.

Set that aside, to concoct a special barbecue sauce. To concoct, you heat on medium low heat; butter, oil, barbecue sauce, chili powder, oregano, and cayenne pepper for about a minute. Once everything has simmered nicely you pour it over your chex mixture and toss.

Once tossed, you stick the mixture in a pan and bake for 45 minutes with stirring breaks every 15 minutes or so. It is suggested that after baking you allow to cool for about an hour. I ate a bite soon after and it was delicious, so if you want to stick it to the cookbook man, it’s safe to do so.

This next recipe comes from my Light and Healthy cookbook. I made a soup from it last time and it’s the first repeat recipe since I started this blog. I haven’t gone through the complete rotation quite yet though. The rotation of cookbooks got re-ordered after the great flood of my kitchen sink a month ago so I just started a new order.

My original copy of this book was paperback and the new one is a hardcover. It’s slightly different, but has all the same recipes. The recipes are just categorized and organized differently. The big difference is that they have sub-sections for everything. The sub-section I’m in right now is party mixes, under the category appetizers. The current party mix is Spicy Asian Party mix.

What makes this party mix Asian and spicy is that it has wasabi peas in it. I love spicy stuff and wasabi is one of the few spicy things that get to me. A small bite of wasabi can clear out your sinuses quicker than a neti pot.

The other ingredients are rice chex cereal, honey roasted peanuts, melba crackers, and chow mein noodles. It was very easy to make, as most chex mixes tend to be. After you throw in all the ingredients above, you mix soy sauce, butter, cayenne pepper, and other spices. Once the butter has melted and turned into a glaze, you spread it over the mixture and then bake everything for a few minutes.

The end result is very tasty. Although, I forgot that I didn’t have butter, so I substituted with a little bit of oil. I have a feeling the butter would have made it much better, but it was still good. The mixture of the honey roasted peanuts and the wasabi peas gave the mix a very unique flavoring as well.

The only thing I didn’t really care for was the chow mein noodles. They were too crunchy and hard to chew. I don’t really feel they added to the mix either, so I would do without that next time.

I ended up bringing this mix to my acting class where it was very much enjoyed. Although one friend of mine teased me and told me I needed to put a warning sign about the wasabi peas. He got a good chunk and hasn’t quite forgiven me for it.